The accuracy of physician documentation has been scrutinized for years, but a relatively new focus of complaints involves how doctors use features of electronic health record systems to support their claims.

Doctors and nurses really don’t like their new electronic health records systems. And, as EHR implementations increase ahead of government deadlines for incentive dollars, dissatisfaction among clinicians is growing. The problem might be that EHR implementation is treated as a purely technological issue when in reality it is a workforce issue.

Last Wednesday the U.S. Senate confirmed Marilyn Tavenner, a former nurse and hospital company executive, as the first full-fledged administrator for the Medicare and Medicaid healthcare programs since 2006.

The American Medical Association (AMA) has released a report clarifying its position on the idea of skipping ICD-10 altogether and moving straight to ICD-11 when it becomes available in an unknown number of years. While the AMA has been protesting the implementation of ICD-10 for some time, and continues to do so, the report states that moving straight to ICD-11 is “fraught with pitfalls” and “not recommended.”

File this under “unintended consequences.” In response to a new federal rule that is designed to strengthen patient privacy protections, CVS has decided to end its so-called refill reminder program that is funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

Broward Health, which has 2,000 physicians who practice at its southeast Florida hospitals, recently launched a "bring your own device" program at its Imperial Point hospital. The program invites doctors to bring their laptops or tablets into the hospital to enroll and encrypt them for use at the hospital or wherever they may want to update their patient orders or see records online. Two hundred physicians have enrolled so far.

The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's manual of mental disorders is finally out, offering the latest revision in nearly 20 years of the diagnostic bible used by individuals and agencies, insurers, schools and government bodies to navigate the mental health landscape. But just as it’s birthed, the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders – widely known as the DSM-5 – is under attack by prominent critics, including the chairman of the task force that created the last version.

What do we eat? New food map will tell us what we buy at stores and what we consume

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have taken existing commercial databases of food items in stores and people’s homes, including the store-based scanner data of 600,000 different foods, and matched that information with the nutrition facts panels on the back of packages and government data on individuals’ dietary intake. The result is an enormous database that has taken almost three years to construct and includes more detail than researchers have ever had on grocery store items – their individual nutritional content, who is buying them and their part in consumers’ diets.

In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, this routine fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort – all of it based on science.